


Red right hand.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Depression, M/M, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-01-16 10:17:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1343857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For that instant, you were back in time: you were a shield again, nothing but that, something you could place between him and death. In you was the might and will you used to wield so effortlessly, in the flexing of your fingertips. You were powerless flesh, but you forgot it. You forgot everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red right hand.

The first hunt after- _after_ being a kind of evasive _politesse_ , a word you use inside your head sometimes when things seem overwhelming, a word you say sometimes out loud when other words don’t come- is an anticlimax, considering all of the preparations Dean insisted on. You spent a week firing the guns and taking them apart and cleaning them and practicing your draw. You got a cell phone with emergency numbers programmed into it, and a lesson on voicemail. Dean made you put on a suit jacket and tie and took your picture in front of a plain shower curtain and then made you new ID cards with the laminator he bought at the Wal-Mart in Lebanon. He talked through the interview process in the car, even though you tuned out for parts of it, watching the earth roll away beside you, the long low clouds and houses in the distance, perched on hills and strung with long wires that reached from pole to pole to pole to pole, forever.

"Hey," Dean had said, snapping his fingers. "Pay attention." You’d turned back to him and seen the worry in his face, bare and plain and obvious, for all his jokes and lecturing. It was endearing and also abjectly horrible: you did this, made him afraid this way. For you, newly useless. "Anyway, so. You gotta work to read people, try to get on their level. More than likely they’ll tell you the important stuff without even knowing it’s important. And they don’t like it when you bang on the table, remember?"

"I remember," you’d said, and looked back out the window, to the trees whipping past. You did remember. You’d been playing hunter then: playing puppet, too, only you didn’t know it. You’d slammed your hand down on a woman’s kitchen table like an actor on television, demanding the truth. Your hand could have gone straight through the table, broken it in half, reduced it to atoms; your hand could have driven through the floorboards and pulled them up one by one like matchsticks in a model house. There was so much power in you then that you didn’t even need it all. You could lose track of it, disappear inside it. You could pluck an anvil off the floor and dangle it from your fingers, and forget it weighed more than a flower. All of that was gone, and now you were a human man in a car with two other human men, hunting an angry ghost- yet another human man, someone who had burned to death inside a building, attacked and left there, unable to open a door or a window, unable to lift his broken, failing human body off the floor. You were trying not to think about that in distressing, personal terms.

The hunt goes smoothly: like working clocks or textbooks, Dean says something about that. And he’s proud of you, of your good timing and good instincts, your good shooting. That pleases you. So you try to be proud, too. It doesn’t quite work. You smile through dinner but then you lie in your bed- the bed Sam taught you how to make, tucking the corners in carefully- and curl into yourself and try to feel something besides emptiness and heavy doubt, something that will make you unclench your hands and fall asleep. 

You think about holding up that anvil, Dean asking if you could; and then you think about the anvil slipping in your hands and crushing the life out of you, pressing down until there is no air left, no color in the world, no chance to go back and undo it. It terrifies a part of you and satisfies another part, the part that is still hungry for punishment, for atonement, brimming over with regret. You wonder if all humans have these uncontrollable thoughts, these urges towards bleak fantasy, or if it’s just you: you and your diminished self, the incompatibility of what you _were_ forced to confront what you _are_. You are a human now, but maybe a broken one. You say as much to Sam one day, without meaning to. It slips out when you are making yourself a sandwich. He makes a sad, surprised face and you regret it.

"Cas," he says, very gently, "you’re not broken."

"Are you sure?" you ask him. You don’t mean to raise your voice but you do, your voice raises by itself, as if it were in charge. Somebody has to be. "How would you know?"

"I just-" Sam says, and tries to smile at you, and shakes his head. "You’re a good person," he says. "You’re okay." You like Sam, but you’re not sure he has any basis for comparison, you think he’s mainly being kind.

"Thank you," you say. You have taken hold of yourself again, a little. "Please," you say, then. "I don’t know if, Dean- I would rather you didn’t mention-"

"I understand," Sam says. 

 

 

 

"What the _fuck_ ,” Dean says, for the thirtieth time in fifteen minutes. He is clutching his own shirt over your hand, around it, cradling the bloody bundle against himself, pushing your other hand away when you try to take over the application of pressure. You are both sitting in the back seat while Sam drives the car eighty miles an hour towards the closest emergency room. “What the fucking _fuck_ , Cas, what the fuck were you _thinking_?”

"I wasn’t," you say. You let your head slip backwards against the bench seat; you feel light-headed.

"Fuck, I guess not," Dean says. His voice is shaking. He wraps his fingers around the shirt, keeps his hands tight. At the emergency room they take you in pretty quickly. You are given something for the pain and it makes you dopey, turns the world dreamlike as you watch them clean and stitch the massive slice across your palm. Another half-inch or so and it would have nearly severed the top of your hand from the bottom. As it is, it takes a very long time to put you back together, and in the meantime, you drift. You come back to full consciousness in the back seat of the car again, with Dean sitting beside you, one arm around your waist to keep you upright and still, to keep your mummified hand from slipping down and hitting the bench seat. They must have sneaked you out of the ER at some point, along with a plastic bag of pill bottles you can see in the foot well. They’ve been busy, while you’ve been in outer space. Dean sighs and drums his fingers and asks Sam how long, and then for a second- a second in which you don’t breathe- he rests his cheek against the top of your head. "What were you thinking," he murmurs, his face close to your scalp. He doesn’t seem to realize that you’re awake.

You weren’t thinking. A half-truth: you weren’t thinking about _that_. You were not thinking about the werewolf at all, except in the most abstract sense. It had knocked Dean across the room and lunged after him and in that moment there was only you and the creature, and your human heart and lungs and fallible reflexes had not registered, your _life_ had not registered, only your _existence_. For that instant, you were back in time: you were a shield again, nothing but that, something you could place between him and death. In you was the might and will you used to wield so effortlessly, in the flexing of your fingertips. You were powerless flesh, but you forgot it. You forgot everything.

You’d stepped between them, and held out your hand.

And the werewolf had nearly clawed it off, the silly piece of meat at the end of your arm, just as helpless as the rest of you. It almost makes you cry. “Cas?” you hear Dean say now, softly, worried again, from somewhere over you. Oh. It seems you are crying, after all.

"It’s nothing," you say. "It- just hurts."

"Okay," Dean says. He holds onto you with one hand still, and then after a minute he brings the other hand up to circle you entirely, both hands joined across your ribs, strong and solid. For a second, you almost feel whole. "Okay."

 

 

 

Almost a week later you wake up and Dean is sitting at the edge of your bed, waiting for you. There are two mugs sitting on the little chest of drawers beside your bed; steam curls up out of them like smoke from two tiny chimneys. 

"Hey," says Dean. His eyes are sad and kind and you know, you know that Sam told. You want to say good morning but when your mouth opens up, nothing comes out of it. You lie there and stare up at him and after a second your eyes burn, your face feels hot like you’re going to cry again, but it seems you can’t manage that, either. You shut your eyes for a second and pretend that it means he can’t see you. Like the anvil, another one of your sad fantasies. "Cas," he says. "Sam told me what you said."

"Oh," you say.

"He was worried about you," says Dean. "It bothered him to say anything, but he thought he had to."

"Of course," you say. Your eyes are still shut, you are an ostrich in a hole, headed for the center of the earth. "But I’m fine."

"You’re not fine," says Dean.

"I’m- what else can I be," you say. You open your eyes. You’re a little angry. The words bubble out of you, they gush and churn. "I’m fine. I have to be fine. There’s nothing else for me to be. I have to be this. Even if-"

"If what?"

"Even if I’m a bad human." There it is, it’s come out of your mouth. There’s no hiding anymore. You sit up and push the covers off with your good hand, wincing when the wrapped one hits the surface of the bed. You sit there in your pajama pants- the ones Dean gave you- and stare down at your knees. "I still can’t be anything else."

"Christ," Dean says. He’s staring at you. "This is what you’ve been worried about?" You look at him and you can feel your eyes narrowing down to slits. For some bizarre reason that makes him smile. "There you are," he says, absurdly. "Cas, you’re like the best person I know. You’ve got to be kidding."

"I have these thoughts," you say. "These- sad, wrong thoughts. I can’t always make them stop."

"Yeah," says Dean. "Join the club." He smiles at your confusion, but not unkindly, and without much bitterness. "So much shit has happened to you," Dean says. "You got a right to think sad things, maybe. Just- if it’s too much, you gotta talk to me. You have to say something. Don’t think you’re all alone."

"Okay."

"Okay?" Dean repeats after you. He sounds relieved. "Good. You hungry?" You nod at him. "I’ll get breakfast going." You follow him out to the kitchen and there you sit and watch Dean work: cracking eggs in a bowl and whisking them with a little milk and pepper and green onions, scrambling them in a pan that he’s already cooked the sausages in, making the eggs just a little greasy and heavily scented with sage. He has his back to you when he says, "So, the werewolf." It sounds like a question.

"I’m sorry," you say. "It was foolish. It won’t happen again." Dean doesn’t respond; he sets out two plates and two forks; apparently Sam has already had his oatmeal and will not be joining them for what he calls _heart attack eggs_. Privately, you think of them as _comfort eggs_. They are what Dean makes when somebody’s unhappy. Sometimes it’s him, but this time it’s you. Dean doles out your half and then his own, and sits down at the table across from you. The two of you eat in a silence that is almost comfortable. After a while he says, 

"How’s the hand?"

"Hm?" You look up. Your mouth is still full. He’s not meeting your eyes, but staring at his plate, where there are still two pieces of green onion that he’s pushing around. "It’s fine," you say, reflexively. But then you look down at it. He’s asked for your honesty and you are still capable of giving that. "Actually, it itches. I’d like to change the dressing."

"I’ll help," says Dean.

In the bathroom you sit on the closed toilet seat while Dean spreads out the salves and gauze; he unwraps your hand and frowns at the healing lines, the stitches still prominent along the ridge. It’s pink instead of red now, less angry, starting to pull together like it should. They did a good job. Your fingers can still move, even though you’re not trying to move them much: there wasn’t much nerve damage. You will likely be able to grip things again with strength someday, the feeble human strength that remains to you. Dean cleans the cut and all around it, and applies the salve like he was instructed to, before he took you out through the loading bay to escape answering insurance questions. He wraps your hand loosely again, but then he doesn’t let it go.

Dean holds your hand between both of his own and then he lifts it a little higher as he bends down to lower his face. He closes his eyes and presses his mouth to the back of your hand, cradles his fingers around yours and kisses your knuckles. It seems like you are hallucinating this, but you aren’t. Pretty soon you realize you have stopped breathing, and now your lungs make a clawing gasp for air.

"Dean," you say. It’s the only word you can form, sometimes: like right now. "Dean."

"I saw you hold it up," he says. "I saw you go in front of that thing, and I was _so_ fucking-” he says, and stops, and kisses the back of your hand again, presses his cheek to it for a second and then lets go. “I don’t care what you are,” he says, and looks up. His eyes are fierce. “An angel or a dude or God almighty, broken, not broken, I don’t give a fuck, Cas, I- you gotta know,” he says, almost sheepishly. “You could read my mind, before. You know, right? That I- you have to know already.” Your head swims.

"Yes," you say. It’s only a little bit of a lie: you knew, you just never let yourself believe it.

"Do you, uh-"

"More than anything," you say, in a rush. That is the unvarnished truth, and maybe you will go to hell for it, though you hardly know who’s keeping track anymore: more than anything, more than your own life, and more than the God that made you. More than peace and more than punishment, that is how much you will love him. You love him so much you will live in this world, inside this strange, flawed body with its weakened hands, remaining with him, even if there is nothing you can do for him but adore him, and sometimes throw yourself in front of things. Dean is looking at you in awe, now, as if he can see something that you no longer can. As if there were still some grace, some divine essence hidden from you, visible only to him, for a reason you can’t comprehend. Maybe this is so. Maybe it’s because he was always human: they have their own ideas of beauty and of love, apart from angels, and theirs are so much more forgiving. Theirs can change. 

"Cas," he says, and leans forward and kisses you. It is not the start of your life: that was at night, alone in a field. This is something different, and better.

 

 

 

Your hand heals but you are still dropping cups for a while, losing your grip on forks and hairbrushes, trembling sometimes when the muscles are tired and twitchy. Sam googles physical therapy exercises for you and you spend time in front of the television gently squeezing a balled-up sweatsock, or doing mild stretches. You cannot hold a gun or a knife with that hand. Not yet. But you can hold Dean: your imperfect, trembling, tender hand can stroke his cheek or smooth his hair down, can skim his hipbones or run along his back in a caress. Your nerves come back to life doing that, touching him, feeling the softness of his skin and the rolling cords of his muscles, the curving ridge of his kneecaps and the hollow of his collarbones. You are still frustrated when you drop things and break them, you still sometimes retreat to your room or your bed and stare up at the ceiling and feel your hand spasming, your heart thudding and your limbs heavy like wet sacks of concrete, a mantra of helplessness and loss clouding all your thoughts. You are still getting left behind on hunts, except for the research parts. You are still not certain what it is you’re good for.

"Roll over," Dean says. He’s found you in here, lying on your back, grim-faced and silent. He nudges you over and you roll onto your side and he slides behind you, wraps an arm around your waist. His knees nudge into the soft backs of yours. You can feel him warming you at every point you touch. You close your eyes and hold onto his arm, linked over your stomach like an anchor. You were wrong about some things. You’re starting to see that. There is power in it after all, in this body and in his, in joined hands, in the way his chest rises against your back: in flesh and blood. Not divine power, the kind that could shatter mountains. But maybe a power to build them back up again, one pebble at a time. One handful after another, slowly. You can try. "Okay?" Dean asks.

"Okay," you say.

 

 

.


End file.
